Lookup eBay vs BiddersEdge. BE was scraping eBay's site, eBay sued, eBay won on "trespass to chattles" legal grounds. eBay, as owner of the servers BE was scraping, has the right to prevent anyone from accessing those servers. Whether eBay "owns" the data is not relevant; they own the servers being accessed.
I just asked Gemini "do X's TOS allow anyone to access X via the api?" and it said "No", with a long list of conditions for accessing X via their API.
This is very clearly an attempt by X to use the legal system to harass people doing perfectly legal things. The chilling effect on speech is the whole point
This is very clearly an attempt by X to use the legal system to harass people doing perfectly reasonable things, but are you sure they are legal? I would assume that is against the ToS and I don't think the law makes an exception for cases like this (IANAL of course).
Terms of service have no legal binding unless both parties agree to them.
In other words, if X has a public API and Nitter is using it, then neither Nitter themselves nor the Nitter users have to agree to any terms of service in order to do so.
X cannot expect anyone to behave in accordance with terms and conditions they never agreed to.
We need to revise the law around
terms of service, we are allowing companies to impose all kinds of monopolistic, anti competitive, user hostile, privacy invasion, and other measures against the public interest simply by burying provision in a wall of text they know no one will understand even if they read it.
> In other words, if X has a public API and Nitter is using it, then neither Nitter themselves nor the Nitter users have to agree to any terms of service in order to do so.
That's not true. Publicly available source code with licenses dispute your claim.
(IANAL) That's copyright law and not contract law. Perhaps X could try to put a clause in its ToS that publishing content there grants the copyright to itself, but I'm pretty sure it won't be accepted well even if it's legal.
If you have entered into the contract and are even party to it in the first place, which is not clear in this case and is likely going to be one of the questions litigated here.
Didn't the guy run an instance himself? Clickwrap licenses are generally held to be enforceable so that's one way he "agreed" to the terms. Also even if he didn't, as a matter of practicality he probably needed to connect to the site to develop nitter , which exposes him there too.
It's impossible to know what this "legal advice" was, but it was always a dubious claim.
The software project itself is probably fine. The legal risk is always going to be with the person that hosts it with the intention of facilitating the unauthorized access of Twitter's website. Seems like that could run afoul of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.
Those people should seek their own legal advice and not listen to anything this guy says.
I was misled by an individual who claimed to be helping the Nitter project pro bono with a team of lawyers. He made up a timeline of events that sounded mostly believable.
I have not given legal advice to any Nitter operators, so I'm not sure what you're trying to say?
>I was misled by an individual who claimed to be helping the Nitter project pro bono with a team of lawyers. He made up a timeline of events that sounded mostly believable.
I want to believe this was a case of incompetency on their part rather than malice because wow, that's a horrible thing to do.
Wouldn't be unprecedented. Megamind Musk got scammed out of $ 50.000,- USD by someone claiming to be a PI on then Twitter [0], despite having access to (as near as makes no difference) infinite investigatory resources. If someone claimed to be a pro bono legal team, a less affluent project threatened by letters from high class lawyers, could easily fall for that and I could easily see it be malicious. Maybe trolls, maybe investors wanting to help SpaceXAI or whatever it is called today, maybe someone wishing to convert into donations/crypto rug pull, etc. Could also be incompetence after all, but maliciousness isn't without priors.
Nitter is/was a free, open-source alternative front-end for X (formerly Twitter) that lets users view public posts without an account, ads, or tracking scripts.
I don’t think nitter can run legally. It would be like having a proxy for nytimes or cnn. I think its (or systems like it) only possible future is to acknowledge it doesn’t have a legal future.
There is a strong distinction between news articles authored by or on behalf of a company, versus user generated content.
So I don't think nytimes, or cnn is an apt comparison.
It's more like your cellular provider claiming intellectual ownership over the web you browsed and conversations you read when people start sharing their downloaded pages.
> articles authored by or on behalf of a company, versus user generated content.
It gives me both a sense of schadenfreude but also a deep depression to watch the shoe on the other foot.
It was only a couple years ago that the talking point was "It's a private company!!", used to defend mass censorship on old Twitter, defend delisting of Parler on app stores, etc.
> It would be like having a proxy for nytimes or cnn
It's a much grayer area, considering NYTimes owns their content and x does not own the content they serve. I think this question deserves zealous representation.
The legal future is whatever people fight for being legal. You see entities that are hostile to humanity making the laws they want all the time, why be so defeatist?
Normally I'd agree, but in this case the people on the other end of the issue rarely care about how vague the legality of something is before going forward with it, so I think it's only reasonable to extend the same logic to nitter.
If one party is reckless in legal terms, then that's their right and they will bear the consequences. It's generally considered to be a bad attitude to have, which is why people generally don't have it, and I'm going to need an explanation on how wishing that onto Nitter isn't in practice wanting someone else to burn at the stake to spite a third party, especially given the enormous difference in economical, and as a result legal standing on both of those entities.
Said more explicitly, wanting some random guy who made a project to risk aspects of their livelihood to spite Elon Musk because you don't like him is psychopathic.
It is not my wish for nitter to shoulder any more burden than they can reasonably carry, which at this point unfortunately seems zero.
What I'm stating is that I'd normally be against a project like nitter on moral grounds had it been targeting a forum such as mineralenthusiasts.com that required you to log in to view posts, but since the counterparty in this case is a habitual bad actor extending the same goodwill to them only empowers them, and it would be best for nitter to function as much as it can unless its illegality is established in court.
I could accuse you of things as equally unpleasant as psychopathy for making me spell this out, which I had hoped would be incredibly obvious from my original comment, but I'll refrain from doing so.
> wanting some random guy who made a project to risk aspects of their livelihood to spite Elon Musk because you don't like him is psychopathic.
Speaking only for myself: I agree with the spirit of this statement (perhaps minus the use of the word “psychopathic”).
However, it seems like the author of Nitter wants to continue to engage in this risky activity, and is requesting resources to help. If they ever wish to stop developing Nitter/XCancel, I will absolutely respect that. But assuming they wish to continue, I consider supporting them and doing my part to frustrate a man-child, unrepentant fascist, and murderer of thousands a noble thing to do.
Who’s the man-child here though? Elon is running multiple companies, spread his DNA and ideas everywhere, and makes a very real impact on the world every day.
And then there’s you. Who believes it’s “noble” to frustrate someone you don’t like. In reality, you’re not frustrating anyone but yourself.
So I ask again.. who’s the man child? Elon? Or you?
And who’s the fascist? The man minding his own business, and doing his thing? Or the guy who desperately wants to tell that man what to do?
Much to my dismay. Most of his ideas have a long track record of being drastically incorrect or dangerous. And he treats his children like shit, so much that at least one of his children wants nothing to do with him. Also “spreads his DNA everywhere” is a really weird way to talk about how many children he has.
> and makes a very real impact on the world every day.
Agreed. He certainly impacted the millions of people he murdered running DOGE.
In a just world, he’d be behind bars for the rest of his pathetic life. But since we don’t live in a just world, I’m trying to do my (admittedly extremely small) part in correcting that.
> And who’s the fascist? The man minding his own business,
This is a hilariously wrong way to describe him. The fascist is the man who sieg heil’ed, twice, in front of a large audience, and then backed it up via every politically-related action he’s taken since then.
> In a just world, he’d be behind bars for the rest of his pathetic life.
Everyone is well aware that the fascistic, violent, envious left wants everyone who won’t say a man wearing a dress is a woman in prison or dead. Really weird hill to die on, but the left did die there.
The good news for me and all the other people who didn’t descend into severe mental illness when Trump was elected is that you don’t matter and can’t do anything.
Elon just can’t stop mattering, and can’t stop doing very real things. Literal opposite of your average marxist.
> He certainly impacted the millions of people he murdered running DOGE.
Name one of the millions of people he murdered. Just one. It’s funny that you can’t. But you will go on telling huge lies on the internet anyway.
You’re not responding to anything I’m actually saying, and your statements are so hyperbolic that it’s not worth continuing in good faith. I’d welcome a good faith conversation if you change your mind.
> Name one of the millions of people he murdered. Just one. It’s funny that you can’t. But you will go on telling huge lies on the internet anyway.
Here are four: Yamah Freeman, Gbessey Kiadu, Ibrahim Koroma, Achol Deng. Elon Musk ran the “agency” that fed USAID “into the wood chipper.” He is therefore responsible for their deaths. This is murder. Please retract your statement.
You mean like silencing users that use the term “cis” or “cisgender”? [0]
Or banning an account tracking his jet, even after explicitly stating that he was so committed to freedom of speech that he wouldn’t ban that specific account? [1]
Or complying significantly more often with suppression demands from authoritarian governments than the previous management of Twitter did? [2]
From your statements here it appears that you take everything he says at face value. I would strongly encourage you to stop doing that.
I understand. I think that when faced with specific examples that refute my claim, I’d also prefer to shy away from addressing them and instead only reply to the final sentence of the post which was the least important.
I am quite surprised by the number of comments critical of Nitter.
I personally don't use it but frontends like these are very important in today's day and age.
As sad as it is, the majority of online discourse nowadays happens on platforms whose algorithms and interfaces are controlled by corporations.
A project like Nitter probably can't run legally, and that's okay. Custom mobile clients for Reddit still work after they banned it, life finds a way. I'm all for funding these projects though because at the end of the day, someone has to build it.
Despite the VC firm trying to assimilate the word “hacker” to humanize itself, this place is Tech-bro News and the userbase will always tend to take the side of capital.
It wasn’t always like this, it changed in the last 10 ish years as the industry became more lucrative. Or maybe it’s been happening more slowly over a longer period of time, but I do think the earlier founders were more idealistic
+1. There is endless bullshit nitpicking that goes on here. Sometimes useful because we don't want a hive mind, but it becomes... really unnecessary with a lot of apologism (sometimes)
Musk is well-known for spending lots of money on viral marketing and online reputation services with bot accounts and astro-turfing. He has an extremely fragile ego and a pathological desire to be liked and, oddly, he desires to be considered a funny person, too (which he isn't). To cut a long story short, you cannot and should not trust comment sections about Musk anywhere. It's been like that for more than 10 years already.
For the decade+ there has been an unofficial town square known as twitter. As the town square has slowly become more gated and overgrown with weeds some people thought giving people a way to access the town square without paying the entrance fee would be helpful. Many found this useful.
Now I think the whole thing is trash, and agree, why use Twitter? But people like journalists and AI executives are still announcing things on Twitter because having a large following seems like a dopamine booster. In this world where people see the following as a source of legitimacy, having a single company own that town square seems...problematic.,
Can I just add too, it's why 'popularity' is an incredibly terrible metric for successfulness on the web
Look at Twitter. If it was good under Dorsey (debatable, it did have pretty notable censorship) and Musk ruins it, why are people 'still on it'? Because Musk did a good job? Not necessarily. It takes time to build a new product, and get your friends to switch over. Switching costs. I'm on a platform because Avicebron is on it, because Alice is on it, because Bob is on it
Same goes for sites like (especially) Facebook. It's 'popular'! 3 billion active users! (They lie a lot and probably about that and they make it very easy to be 'active', by faking the notifications or giving you none at all, like increasingly with messages over the years) Well, it's hard to 'just move'. Facebook has become and has been for a while an utterly shit product that deserves the corporate death penalty. People being on it is not the slam dunk people think it is
I'm reminded of the phrase 天下为公, which is hard to translate exactly because 公 is doing some linguistical juggling that English has a hard time matching.
I don't think twitter in its current capacity should exist, the storage should be decoupled from the filters and the filters that everyone uses should be a free market with traditional competition dynamics. It may end up looking something like twitter, but without editorializing algorithms and a single walled entry. We can quibble who owns the database I suppose.
It seems like a reasonable question to ask and I'm surprised to see you, in particular, take this point of view.
I could argue that due to the New York Times being the "newspaper of record" they should post my manifesto because, after all, it's very important. The obvious objection to this is that the NYT is privately owned, and despite having made itself very important, I don't have the right to tell them what to do.
This is the obvious objection to "Twitter is important, we should get to tell it what to do" as well, and you're old enough to know that Twitter kneecapping third-party apps is not at all new to the Musk chapter of the company, either.
Is it different, though? If so, how? Granted the jibe about the UN was sarcastic, but it's the same question, and, you know it.
It was only a “town square” in the minds of Twitter users, no one else thinks that about a news media propped-up social network. If anything it was a comment section attached to nothing. And comment sections all get bad after a while.
I don’t use it, but some government organizations keep doing it. Why on earth they do that, I will never know, but I’m not making an account to read a tweet.
Because some people in positions of power ignore the consequences of using external services.
There has been a bit of a wake up call in this regard in Europe, with many governments making efforts to detach themselves from US corporations, but it's a much larger problem. When a government entity chooses to rely on Whatsapp, or Android, or some other piece of technology bound to a corporation, they are creating a bond between the rights and services they enable and interaction with that corporation.
This nuance is often ignored because "Well everybody uses (thing) anyway" and other shortsighted trains of thought. I'm by no means against opposing X in principle, but the issue at hand is not itself about X, and I suspect a lot of people wouldn't care if it was still Twitter.
This is just like the ad-blocker discussion and Nitter is just as fine as ad blockers. Sometimes official sources make announcements via services they should be prohibited by law from using, so you need to buy into the sour apple and read these announcements by other means, whether that means using an ad blocker or Nitter. There is no copyright infringement because X does not hold the copyright on the (vast majority) of that content.
Also worth noting: I click on Nitter links but I would never in my life click on an "X" link. When I use Nitter, X loses zero ad revenue.
This comes across to me as a surprising question - why do you assume there's such a bio at all, rather than it being developed by someone anonymous, as is the case for many questionably legal privacy tools?
That's exactly what VCs are good for. Cities could've shut down Uber any time they wanted, but they didn't, so it grew big.
There has to be a plausible path to making money though. If the purpose of nitter is to not make money, VCs won't fund it. If it substituted X's ads for Nitter's own ads, that could work, but the online ad market isn't as lucrative as it once was so it wouldn't be enough money.
You could find a VC whose other project has similar legal concerns and get them to fund your legal case to set precedent, but I don't know what that project would be.
Surely Nitter is open source and has 1.4K forks alread. So it should be easy to ramp that up to several thousand more, which can make it harder to stop? or am i being naive?
IANAL but unfortunately the law isn't really in Nitter's favor, as Elon could easily win the fight that Nitter can be considered as a read-only scrapping mirror, which itself makes total sense why Elon tries to C&D it since it is a loophole for other AI companies, probably especially OpenAI, to read the feeds for free.
tl;dr Elon's ground can easily be that there is an official paid service that let's you read the feeds unrestricted (this will be a good counter-challenge however IMO) while Nitter tried to run around it. So the First Amendment defense from Nitter should be shit outta luck
For better or worse, some important people only post on X. Whenever an X post makes it to front page HN, it's convenient to have Libredirect installed and then it takes you to Nitter instead so you can actually read it.
It's for worse. Stop clicking on twitter/nitter/xitter links, stop following those people. If they care to keep you as an audience, they will move to another platform.
Perhaps Musk is in his legal right to turn Twitter into a walled garden, but it certainly seems like false advertising to me after he kept describing his model as a public square. You can be a public square or a walled garden, but not both.
A lot of important information is on Twitter. Being able to access it without giving them your personal information and without jumping through hoops is a good thing.
What the people defacto running the world's most powerful economy are saying seems quite important to get from a primary source. It's so easy to take a few screenshots of a few tweets and write many completely contradictory stories.
I can assure you, you don’t need to access Twitter to get that information, they are relayed everywhere. Which is really unfortunate because they don’t deserve the attention they receive. Try for yourself, stop using the platform for like a month, you won’t miss anything of value
You don't have to talk to me like a twitter-addicted baby, I was never on it and I probably open a twitter like three times per year.
If you're happy getting your information second-hand, I guess that's your choice, but not everyone is. If I read a news article that cites a tweet as a source, I'd like to see the rest of the tweet thread for context. It might not be what it seems.
I used it until they required i download the mobile app. Was fine having an account and viewing via web but requiring I download the app was a bridge too far.
Lookup eBay vs BiddersEdge. BE was scraping eBay's site, eBay sued, eBay won on "trespass to chattles" legal grounds. eBay, as owner of the servers BE was scraping, has the right to prevent anyone from accessing those servers. Whether eBay "owns" the data is not relevant; they own the servers being accessed.
I just asked Gemini "do X's TOS allow anyone to access X via the api?" and it said "No", with a long list of conditions for accessing X via their API.
Nitter should give up and call it a day.
This is very clearly an attempt by X to use the legal system to harass people doing perfectly legal things. The chilling effect on speech is the whole point
This is very clearly an attempt by X to use the legal system to harass people doing perfectly reasonable things, but are you sure they are legal? I would assume that is against the ToS and I don't think the law makes an exception for cases like this (IANAL of course).
Terms of service have no legal binding unless both parties agree to them.
In other words, if X has a public API and Nitter is using it, then neither Nitter themselves nor the Nitter users have to agree to any terms of service in order to do so.
X cannot expect anyone to behave in accordance with terms and conditions they never agreed to.
We need to revise the law around terms of service, we are allowing companies to impose all kinds of monopolistic, anti competitive, user hostile, privacy invasion, and other measures against the public interest simply by burying provision in a wall of text they know no one will understand even if they read it.
> In other words, if X has a public API and Nitter is using it, then neither Nitter themselves nor the Nitter users have to agree to any terms of service in order to do so.
That's not true. Publicly available source code with licenses dispute your claim.
(IANAL) That's copyright law and not contract law. Perhaps X could try to put a clause in its ToS that publishing content there grants the copyright to itself, but I'm pretty sure it won't be accepted well even if it's legal.
What are you talking about, specifically?
Using software with specific licenses? Or making modifications to it?
That is substantially different from reading the public APIs.
Whats illegal about it? The one vague Texas law that was in the original C&D? Everything else was just TOS violation.
Violating a contract is illegal. It's just not necessarily a crime.
> Violating a contract is illegal.
If you have entered into the contract and are even party to it in the first place, which is not clear in this case and is likely going to be one of the questions litigated here.
Didn't the guy run an instance himself? Clickwrap licenses are generally held to be enforceable so that's one way he "agreed" to the terms. Also even if he didn't, as a matter of practicality he probably needed to connect to the site to develop nitter , which exposes him there too.
I think the click wrap license agreement needs to be revised. Companies are abusing it almost universally.
> Clickwrap licenses are generally held to be enforceable
Sort of. Depends on the jurisdiction, and it's not always the case. That's why this is likely to be one of the core topics litigated in this case.
Nobody on HN is going to know the answer here at this point.
Can you expand on why you think this has a chilling effect on speech?
Elon only wants the fash to speak freely.
It's impossible to know what this "legal advice" was, but it was always a dubious claim.
The software project itself is probably fine. The legal risk is always going to be with the person that hosts it with the intention of facilitating the unauthorized access of Twitter's website. Seems like that could run afoul of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.
Those people should seek their own legal advice and not listen to anything this guy says.
I was misled by an individual who claimed to be helping the Nitter project pro bono with a team of lawyers. He made up a timeline of events that sounded mostly believable.
I have not given legal advice to any Nitter operators, so I'm not sure what you're trying to say?
>I was misled by an individual who claimed to be helping the Nitter project pro bono with a team of lawyers. He made up a timeline of events that sounded mostly believable.
I want to believe this was a case of incompetency on their part rather than malice because wow, that's a horrible thing to do.
Wouldn't be unprecedented. Megamind Musk got scammed out of $ 50.000,- USD by someone claiming to be a PI on then Twitter [0], despite having access to (as near as makes no difference) infinite investigatory resources. If someone claimed to be a pro bono legal team, a less affluent project threatened by letters from high class lawyers, could easily fall for that and I could easily see it be malicious. Maybe trolls, maybe investors wanting to help SpaceXAI or whatever it is called today, maybe someone wishing to convert into donations/crypto rug pull, etc. Could also be incompetence after all, but maliciousness isn't without priors.
[0] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/10/report-musks-500...
[dead]
Nitter is/was a free, open-source alternative front-end for X (formerly Twitter) that lets users view public posts without an account, ads, or tracking scripts.
> that lets users view public posts without an account, ads, or tracking scripts
what’s the mechanism they use to get this content?
HTTP. They just load the page while logged in to one of the server's accounts.
I don’t think nitter can run legally. It would be like having a proxy for nytimes or cnn. I think its (or systems like it) only possible future is to acknowledge it doesn’t have a legal future.
There is a strong distinction between news articles authored by or on behalf of a company, versus user generated content.
So I don't think nytimes, or cnn is an apt comparison.
It's more like your cellular provider claiming intellectual ownership over the web you browsed and conversations you read when people start sharing their downloaded pages.
> articles authored by or on behalf of a company, versus user generated content.
It gives me both a sense of schadenfreude but also a deep depression to watch the shoe on the other foot.
It was only a couple years ago that the talking point was "It's a private company!!", used to defend mass censorship on old Twitter, defend delisting of Parler on app stores, etc.
I think this is really something considering the whole ”social media is not responsible for what ppl post” thing
yea, there's also the fact the public entities have chosen to use this avenue for disseminating legal information
you can "de facto" a lot from this arrangement :(
> It would be like having a proxy for nytimes or cnn
It's a much grayer area, considering NYTimes owns their content and x does not own the content they serve. I think this question deserves zealous representation.
> does not own the content they serve
Do they not? And if they wanted to, couldn't they, pretty trivially, with a ToC change?
NY Times would get you for copyright infringement, but X has no copyright in the content on X.
They just need to rename to nitter.ai, and it would be "legal".
nitter.si
Twitter doesn't own content generated by users, the only legal hurdle would be complying with takedown requests.
The legal future is whatever people fight for being legal. You see entities that are hostile to humanity making the laws they want all the time, why be so defeatist?
Normally I'd agree, but in this case the people on the other end of the issue rarely care about how vague the legality of something is before going forward with it, so I think it's only reasonable to extend the same logic to nitter.
I don't see how that makes any sense whatsoever.
If one party is reckless in legal terms, then that's their right and they will bear the consequences. It's generally considered to be a bad attitude to have, which is why people generally don't have it, and I'm going to need an explanation on how wishing that onto Nitter isn't in practice wanting someone else to burn at the stake to spite a third party, especially given the enormous difference in economical, and as a result legal standing on both of those entities.
Said more explicitly, wanting some random guy who made a project to risk aspects of their livelihood to spite Elon Musk because you don't like him is psychopathic.
It is not my wish for nitter to shoulder any more burden than they can reasonably carry, which at this point unfortunately seems zero.
What I'm stating is that I'd normally be against a project like nitter on moral grounds had it been targeting a forum such as mineralenthusiasts.com that required you to log in to view posts, but since the counterparty in this case is a habitual bad actor extending the same goodwill to them only empowers them, and it would be best for nitter to function as much as it can unless its illegality is established in court.
I could accuse you of things as equally unpleasant as psychopathy for making me spell this out, which I had hoped would be incredibly obvious from my original comment, but I'll refrain from doing so.
> wanting some random guy who made a project to risk aspects of their livelihood to spite Elon Musk because you don't like him is psychopathic.
Speaking only for myself: I agree with the spirit of this statement (perhaps minus the use of the word “psychopathic”).
However, it seems like the author of Nitter wants to continue to engage in this risky activity, and is requesting resources to help. If they ever wish to stop developing Nitter/XCancel, I will absolutely respect that. But assuming they wish to continue, I consider supporting them and doing my part to frustrate a man-child, unrepentant fascist, and murderer of thousands a noble thing to do.
> Do my part to frustrate a man-child.
Who’s the man-child here though? Elon is running multiple companies, spread his DNA and ideas everywhere, and makes a very real impact on the world every day.
And then there’s you. Who believes it’s “noble” to frustrate someone you don’t like. In reality, you’re not frustrating anyone but yourself.
So I ask again.. who’s the man child? Elon? Or you?
And who’s the fascist? The man minding his own business, and doing his thing? Or the guy who desperately wants to tell that man what to do?
> Elon is running multiple companies,
So? Nothing about that is inherently noble.
> spread his DNA and ideas everywhere
Much to my dismay. Most of his ideas have a long track record of being drastically incorrect or dangerous. And he treats his children like shit, so much that at least one of his children wants nothing to do with him. Also “spreads his DNA everywhere” is a really weird way to talk about how many children he has.
> and makes a very real impact on the world every day.
Agreed. He certainly impacted the millions of people he murdered running DOGE.
In a just world, he’d be behind bars for the rest of his pathetic life. But since we don’t live in a just world, I’m trying to do my (admittedly extremely small) part in correcting that.
> And who’s the fascist? The man minding his own business,
This is a hilariously wrong way to describe him. The fascist is the man who sieg heil’ed, twice, in front of a large audience, and then backed it up via every politically-related action he’s taken since then.
> In a just world, he’d be behind bars for the rest of his pathetic life.
Everyone is well aware that the fascistic, violent, envious left wants everyone who won’t say a man wearing a dress is a woman in prison or dead. Really weird hill to die on, but the left did die there.
The good news for me and all the other people who didn’t descend into severe mental illness when Trump was elected is that you don’t matter and can’t do anything.
Elon just can’t stop mattering, and can’t stop doing very real things. Literal opposite of your average marxist.
> He certainly impacted the millions of people he murdered running DOGE.
Name one of the millions of people he murdered. Just one. It’s funny that you can’t. But you will go on telling huge lies on the internet anyway.
You’re not responding to anything I’m actually saying, and your statements are so hyperbolic that it’s not worth continuing in good faith. I’d welcome a good faith conversation if you change your mind.
> Name one of the millions of people he murdered. Just one. It’s funny that you can’t. But you will go on telling huge lies on the internet anyway.
Here are four: Yamah Freeman, Gbessey Kiadu, Ibrahim Koroma, Achol Deng. Elon Musk ran the “agency” that fed USAID “into the wood chipper.” He is therefore responsible for their deaths. This is murder. Please retract your statement.
Edit: here’s a bonus fifth name: Santina Sunday. This article has many paragraphs of detail about how and why she died. https://www.propublica.org/article/kenya-trump-usaid-world-f...
In short, please educate yourself and refrain from posting further fascist talking points until you do so.
> You’re not responding to anything I’m actually saying
I’m demonstrating your lack of value and your unclear thinking. My statements are plainly factual, which is why any marxist will absolutely hate them.
> Here are four: Yamah Freeman, Gbessey Kiadu, Ibrahim Koroma, Achol Deng. Please retract your statement.
None of those people were murdered by Elon Musk. So we have confirmed that you were wrong.
> In short, please educate yourself and refrain from posting further fascist talking points until you do so.
This tactic is too funny. I’m well educated, smart, and will never do what you want.
Did you spill your DNA everywhere writing this too? Or just on yourself?
If you’d like to continue believing that success is immaturity, or that freedom of speech is fascism, then that is certainly your prerogative.
Freedom of speech?
You mean like silencing users that use the term “cis” or “cisgender”? [0]
Or banning an account tracking his jet, even after explicitly stating that he was so committed to freedom of speech that he wouldn’t ban that specific account? [1]
Or complying significantly more often with suppression demands from authoritarian governments than the previous management of Twitter did? [2]
From your statements here it appears that you take everything he says at face value. I would strongly encourage you to stop doing that.
[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/kimelsesser/2023/07/02/elon-mus...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ElonJet?wprov=sfti1#History
[2] https://restofworld.org/2023/elon-musk-twitter-government-or...
> I would strongly encourage you to stop doing that.
Really unconvincing argument. It’s just marxist straw grasping. I will continue on normally, but thanks for the suggestion.
I understand. I think that when faced with specific examples that refute my claim, I’d also prefer to shy away from addressing them and instead only reply to the final sentence of the post which was the least important.
What is this, can't EFF or FSF or some related org provide legal aid
And does the access act as a kind of fair use? Not like Nitter is making money from the access to the content
It should be a signal to others that they aren't getting involved.
I am quite surprised by the number of comments critical of Nitter.
I personally don't use it but frontends like these are very important in today's day and age.
As sad as it is, the majority of online discourse nowadays happens on platforms whose algorithms and interfaces are controlled by corporations.
A project like Nitter probably can't run legally, and that's okay. Custom mobile clients for Reddit still work after they banned it, life finds a way. I'm all for funding these projects though because at the end of the day, someone has to build it.
I’m not surprised.
Despite the VC firm trying to assimilate the word “hacker” to humanize itself, this place is Tech-bro News and the userbase will always tend to take the side of capital.
It wasn’t always like this, it changed in the last 10 ish years as the industry became more lucrative. Or maybe it’s been happening more slowly over a longer period of time, but I do think the earlier founders were more idealistic
> and the userbase will always tend to take the side of capital
I've been here for well over a decade. Let me tell you, it used to be so, so much worse.
100%
Move fast and break other people.
+1. There is endless bullshit nitpicking that goes on here. Sometimes useful because we don't want a hive mind, but it becomes... really unnecessary with a lot of apologism (sometimes)
Musk is well-known for spending lots of money on viral marketing and online reputation services with bot accounts and astro-turfing. He has an extremely fragile ego and a pathological desire to be liked and, oddly, he desires to be considered a funny person, too (which he isn't). To cut a long story short, you cannot and should not trust comment sections about Musk anywhere. It's been like that for more than 10 years already.
Musk spends more money in a week trying to get people to like him than most of us will ever have or spend in our lives
> seeking funding
What’s the purpose of Nitter?
Elevator pitch if you will?
And where can one read a bio of the creator(s)?
> Elevator pitch if you will?
For the decade+ there has been an unofficial town square known as twitter. As the town square has slowly become more gated and overgrown with weeds some people thought giving people a way to access the town square without paying the entrance fee would be helpful. Many found this useful.
Now I think the whole thing is trash, and agree, why use Twitter? But people like journalists and AI executives are still announcing things on Twitter because having a large following seems like a dopamine booster. In this world where people see the following as a source of legitimacy, having a single company own that town square seems...problematic.,
Can I just add too, it's why 'popularity' is an incredibly terrible metric for successfulness on the web
Look at Twitter. If it was good under Dorsey (debatable, it did have pretty notable censorship) and Musk ruins it, why are people 'still on it'? Because Musk did a good job? Not necessarily. It takes time to build a new product, and get your friends to switch over. Switching costs. I'm on a platform because Avicebron is on it, because Alice is on it, because Bob is on it
Same goes for sites like (especially) Facebook. It's 'popular'! 3 billion active users! (They lie a lot and probably about that and they make it very easy to be 'active', by faking the notifications or giving you none at all, like increasingly with messages over the years) Well, it's hard to 'just move'. Facebook has become and has been for a while an utterly shit product that deserves the corporate death penalty. People being on it is not the slam dunk people think it is
Let’s assume the analogy to town square holds, who do you think should control it? The UN?
I'm reminded of the phrase 天下为公, which is hard to translate exactly because 公 is doing some linguistical juggling that English has a hard time matching.
I don't think twitter in its current capacity should exist, the storage should be decoupled from the filters and the filters that everyone uses should be a free market with traditional competition dynamics. It may end up looking something like twitter, but without editorializing algorithms and a single walled entry. We can quibble who owns the database I suppose.
[dead]
Can you stop with the 'just asking questions' routine?
It seems like a reasonable question to ask and I'm surprised to see you, in particular, take this point of view.
I could argue that due to the New York Times being the "newspaper of record" they should post my manifesto because, after all, it's very important. The obvious objection to this is that the NYT is privately owned, and despite having made itself very important, I don't have the right to tell them what to do.
This is the obvious objection to "Twitter is important, we should get to tell it what to do" as well, and you're old enough to know that Twitter kneecapping third-party apps is not at all new to the Musk chapter of the company, either.
Is it different, though? If so, how? Granted the jibe about the UN was sarcastic, but it's the same question, and, you know it.
There is no way someone who is on HN for any amount of time is not aware of what Nitter is.
the EU of course, the actually functioning UN
It was only a “town square” in the minds of Twitter users, no one else thinks that about a news media propped-up social network. If anything it was a comment section attached to nothing. And comment sections all get bad after a while.
There are a lot of public institutions using twitter for their communications.
And they should be utterly ashamed of it. They give it a legitimacy that it has not deserved for years now.
Completely agree, feel the same about facebook et al too.
>What’s the purpose of Nitter?
To allow people to check X without feeling they are contributing to the success of the platform, by bypassing the account requirement.
Jut dont use it, either it's useful or not. X needs revenue to continue to bypassing it illegal and should not be done. Either use X or don't.
I don’t use it, but some government organizations keep doing it. Why on earth they do that, I will never know, but I’m not making an account to read a tweet.
>Why on earth they do that, I will never know
Because some people in positions of power ignore the consequences of using external services.
There has been a bit of a wake up call in this regard in Europe, with many governments making efforts to detach themselves from US corporations, but it's a much larger problem. When a government entity chooses to rely on Whatsapp, or Android, or some other piece of technology bound to a corporation, they are creating a bond between the rights and services they enable and interaction with that corporation.
This nuance is often ignored because "Well everybody uses (thing) anyway" and other shortsighted trains of thought. I'm by no means against opposing X in principle, but the issue at hand is not itself about X, and I suspect a lot of people wouldn't care if it was still Twitter.
You don't have a choice when cities, counties, or other government officials decide to make announcements on there.
> X needs revenue to continue
I think that's the point
All services need money to function.
[flagged]
If it's dead the people posting there that we're trying to get access to will post somewhere else, probably somewhere easier to access.
> me hate him coz media told me so
What an amazingly dumbass thing to say. Yes, there's no reasons why a person would rationally dislike Elon, sure.
I hope you realize how people perceive you when you utter such inanity.
what else is illegal? adblock?
This is just like the ad-blocker discussion and Nitter is just as fine as ad blockers. Sometimes official sources make announcements via services they should be prohibited by law from using, so you need to buy into the sour apple and read these announcements by other means, whether that means using an ad blocker or Nitter. There is no copyright infringement because X does not hold the copyright on the (vast majority) of that content.
Also worth noting: I click on Nitter links but I would never in my life click on an "X" link. When I use Nitter, X loses zero ad revenue.
[dead]
> And where can one read a bio of the creator(s)?
This comes across to me as a surprising question - why do you assume there's such a bio at all, rather than it being developed by someone anonymous, as is the case for many questionably legal privacy tools?
The purpose is being able to read X in the browser without an account.
Freeing the bird from the shackles of X.
Would you contribute funds?
I just did.
[dead]
Let’s be honest, They won’t. The users won’t fund it, as they want to use it for free.
This is what happens when people say they will “donate” but will actually wait for others to do it and little to no one donates.
What you are seeing is the bystander effect. It is why projects like Nitter will end up raising capital from VCs as they actually have money.
Seems an unlikely investment for a VC. Xitter can shut down Nitter any time they want, and the end users don't want to pay for it.
That's exactly what VCs are good for. Cities could've shut down Uber any time they wanted, but they didn't, so it grew big.
There has to be a plausible path to making money though. If the purpose of nitter is to not make money, VCs won't fund it. If it substituted X's ads for Nitter's own ads, that could work, but the online ad market isn't as lucrative as it once was so it wouldn't be enough money.
You could find a VC whose other project has similar legal concerns and get them to fund your legal case to set precedent, but I don't know what that project would be.
Can we skip to the moat?
What's the point? Nitter already won since It's open source. Anyone can just fork it and/or self-host it. eg: https://status.d420.de or https://xxcancel.com
Surely Nitter is open source and has 1.4K forks alread. So it should be easy to ramp that up to several thousand more, which can make it harder to stop? or am i being naive?
You're not. It's kinda what happened with youtube-dl at some point.
Nitter is a hydra. One instance goes down, another one goes up.
https://status.d420.de/
Well, it was good while it lasted.
It's still lasting. Use xxcancel.com to be redirected to a random server.
Should serve 307 so the Open Graph preview works.
Most servers don't want automated traffic.
IANAL but unfortunately the law isn't really in Nitter's favor, as Elon could easily win the fight that Nitter can be considered as a read-only scrapping mirror, which itself makes total sense why Elon tries to C&D it since it is a loophole for other AI companies, probably especially OpenAI, to read the feeds for free.
tl;dr Elon's ground can easily be that there is an official paid service that let's you read the feeds unrestricted (this will be a good counter-challenge however IMO) while Nitter tried to run around it. So the First Amendment defense from Nitter should be shit outta luck
You’re not identifying as a lawyer so please understand it’s much more complicated than that.
I’m not a lawyer but I’ve been involved with litigation between publishers and tech companies regarding scraped content.
It’s much more complicated than you’d ever think.
Personally, I think Nitter is in a strong position.
I quit twitter soon after Elon took over and the neo-Nazi spam. Nothing of value was lost.
Why not invest your time on better services.
For better or worse, some important people only post on X. Whenever an X post makes it to front page HN, it's convenient to have Libredirect installed and then it takes you to Nitter instead so you can actually read it.
It's for worse. Stop clicking on twitter/nitter/xitter links, stop following those people. If they care to keep you as an audience, they will move to another platform.
I have never needed to go to X and if the persons comments matter, it shows up on other social media platforms.
You can wait a week and if it's important the local newspaper will include it in the hardcopy. If it's not important, then well... it's not important.
Until Twitter sues the newspapers for rehosting their (users’) content
Is your comment important?
Perhaps Musk is in his legal right to turn Twitter into a walled garden, but it certainly seems like false advertising to me after he kept describing his model as a public square. You can be a public square or a walled garden, but not both.
It is a public square in the sense that you can speak freely and not get stoned to death.
Also in a public square you’re not supposed to masquerade as another person, which what all these services are trying to do.
[dead]
[flagged]
I don't quite understand the need for nitter. I don't use X/Twitter due to what it accesses, not due to the front end.
A lot of important information is on Twitter. Being able to access it without giving them your personal information and without jumping through hoops is a good thing.
> A lot of important information is on Twitter
Not being able to access it might change that.
That's not what is happening though, people are able to access it just fine.
There is no important information on that platform that you couldn’t get another way
What the people defacto running the world's most powerful economy are saying seems quite important to get from a primary source. It's so easy to take a few screenshots of a few tweets and write many completely contradictory stories.
> What the people defacto running the world's most powerful economy are saying seems quite important to get from a primary source
Are you talking about WeChat, or truth social? I didn’t know nitter worked on either
All the american billionaires and CEOs are still on Twitter, as is the shitposter-in-chief.
I can assure you, you don’t need to access Twitter to get that information, they are relayed everywhere. Which is really unfortunate because they don’t deserve the attention they receive. Try for yourself, stop using the platform for like a month, you won’t miss anything of value
You don't have to talk to me like a twitter-addicted baby, I was never on it and I probably open a twitter like three times per year.
If you're happy getting your information second-hand, I guess that's your choice, but not everyone is. If I read a news article that cites a tweet as a source, I'd like to see the rest of the tweet thread for context. It might not be what it seems.
Many local governments and municipalities use Twitter as the sole way to make announcements.
just use X already
I used it until they required i download the mobile app. Was fine having an account and viewing via web but requiring I download the app was a bridge too far.
No
FAFO. Edit: people who downvoting have to understand that you are supporting TOS violations. That always invite legal troubles.
You don't have to follow TOS. In fact, TOS is always written for the maximum benefit to the company, so you shouldn't follow it.
Think of the TOS is a wild arguement.
Just use X like a normal person
Using X like a normal person is hard in my opinion.
Are there any normal ppl on x?